


Variations on a Theme

by pir8fancier



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 20:05:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pir8fancier/pseuds/pir8fancier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Sherlock and their toes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Variations on a Theme

**Author's Note:**

> This is absolute silliness, seeing how far I can take the basic concept of Planet Sherlock.

John had assumed that three tours in Middle East had rendered him essentially emotionally asbestos. That, like porn, being over exposed to constant carnage causes one to reach a threshold where it just doesn’t shock any more. Apparently not. Lestrade only called Sherlock in on the unusual cases, and John had to admit that this was definitely Sherlock worthy: a room full of naked men who had been tortured in some clearly ritualistic fashion, in addition to having their throats cut, but not before being castrated and having their penises (peni?) shoved into their mouths.

John couldn’t help but notice that all the policemen at the crime scene had a pinched curve to their torsos, their shoulders and hips canted inward, as if to protect their groin regions. He found himself doing the same, tiptoeing through the crime scene with an uncomfortable crunch to his lower back as he tried to curve his hips into an unnatural forward parenthesis of sorts because, well, the very idea…

“How interesting,” purred Sherlock in a tone of voice that could only be described as gleeful.

As if they had planned it, both Lestrade and John blinked in perfect unison, their mouths slack with a similar degree of shock.

“Come again,” rasped Lestrade, because while the carnage certainly colossal, it really did not qualify as interesting. Horrifying maybe. But John knew that when Sherlock said “interesting” he _meant_ interesting. 

Sherlock’s face went through the standard parade of expressions to convey his impatience at their unbelievable stupidity: the eye roll, the sigh of frustration, accompanied by a curt shake of the head and a purse of the lips (My God, they are so bloody thick!). In quick succession his eyes lit on every single corpse and then he returned to them with his usual deadpan expression of, “I don’t know why I bother.” 

“Sorry,” chirped John in a false note of bonhomie. “Just this once, would you care to enlighten us?”

John had found himself doing this lately. Needling Sherlock a wee bit for his own amusement. And sometimes Lestrade’s. Because Sherlock just assumed John was being even _more_ stupid, as opposed to ironic. Which privately amused both John and apparently Lestrade, who at this moment was ducking his head to hide a smile.

“Save me from the world’s idiots. Their dicks!”

Both John and Lestrade’s shoulders jerked just a little at the Sherlock’s use of such slang. Normally he didn’t use any slang unless it was techno-speak. Although if John had given it any thought, Sherlock saying something like “their members,” or “their sexual organs” or “their genitalia” might have been far worse.

Lestrade shook his head; John threw up his hands. 

“The killers switched them around. They don’t belong to the right men. That one, “Sherlock pointed to a small penis roughly the size of a gherkin, “belongs to him,” pointing to a burly man whose hands were roughly the size of a dustbin lid. “And that,” he said, pointing to another dick that was mighty impressive—and while a bit of all right in that department himself, John couldn’t help but think, _Jesus Christ, that’s a biggun_ –“belongs to that chap there,” pointing to a petite gentleman who probably weighed no more than eight stones dripping wet.

“How in the hell can you tell that?” Although normally extremely deferential to Sherlock and even more so at crime scenes, Lestrade didn’t bother to control what was no doubt his ever-mounting irritation. 

“Their baby toes, of course. A dead giveaway.”

Perhaps under the circumstances a poor choice of words. 

*******************************

After the issue of penis size to baby toe configuration had been hotly debated for some minutes—as in John stood his ground as a medical professional and said it was absolute bollocks—Sherlock eventually got bored with the argument and wrapped it up by saying that the knife work was particular to Russians from the southern Steppes, that the castration was an affair of honor involving a young woman who had either been left at the altar or whose innocence had been besmirched or, mostly likely, both.

Which all turned out to be true. Naturally.

******************************

John _refused_ to concede in the penis-to-toe-ratio argument, although to back up his claims he knew he had to have irrefutable evidence that this was utter nonsense, and he had no intention of waiting for the DNA tests to confirm which, um, “whatever” belonged to which groin. Being that Sherlock never slept and when he was awake he seemed to take up an inordinate amount of John’s free time, in that, John never had a minute to himself, John waited until he was at work to give Lestrade a ring.

“Inspector Lestrade, John Watson here.” 

“Hullo, Dr. Watson, what can I do for you?”

John very much liked Greg Lestrade and was constantly amazed at how much verbal abuse Lestrade endured from Sherlock without once just hauling back and letting Sherlock have it. But then again, for Lestrade it was all about the case and not about the ego. In John’s relatively short association with London’s C.I.D., he cherished Lestrade’s ever-welcome maturity, even as he lamented Sherlock’s immutable immaturity. 

“Do you think you could call the morgue and authorize me to have a look around? Have an idea about some medical malady I want to test.” 

“Really? Which malady?”

After he’d hung up, John realized that Lestrade was pulling his leg a bit here. One consequence of being Sherlock’s sidekick was that he tended to be swept up in the general culture of underestimating everyone else’s intelligence. So determined to prove Sherlock wrong that he failed to notice the sly tone in Lestrade’s voice, and John went off on some ramble about the latest murder statistics and ethnicity and all manner of nonsense until Lestrade cut him off.

“Beat you to it. He’s right, Doctor. Had a look-see myself. Beginning to think I could have pulled a bit more in my youth if only I’d gone barefoot once in a while.”

To which John didn’t know how in the hell to reply with anything other than a strangled meep of thanks, at which point he rung off to the sound of self-satisfied chuckles.

******************************

Convinced that Sherlock had somehow bribed the normally scrupulously honest Greg Lestrade into perpetrating this massive joke on him, no sooner had John hung up than he toed off his trainers, not even bothering to unlace them, and yanked his socks off, because, really, this was such utter non—

Oh. Bloody hell. His baby toes were plump and cute and, God help him, just slightly off-scale in comparison to his other toes, as in larger relatively. Even his own toes were conspiring against him. Because while he hadn’t made it a practice to study his own toes—in fact, had he ever, in his entire thirty-eight years, ever bothered to so much as glance at his toes other than to take a nail clipper to them every now and then?—like most if not all men he certainly had lavished an inordinate amount of attention on his dick. Which, if he were pressed to describe it, was plump and cute and just large enough that as a teenager he had something of a strut in his walk.

Uncharacteristically, the idea that baby toes were reliable predictors of nature’s largesse, so to speak, put John in something of a “mood.” Snappish and even surly for several days, he churned all this over in his mind, vacillating between thinking this was nothing more than a great put on, except that all the men he’d examined over the last week had only confirmed this ludicrous hypothesis. There was only one thing to do. Ask Sarah. There was no point in asking Harry. He could imagine her response: “John, why in the fucking hell would I care about the size of some man’s dick?” Sarah, however, would back him up as a medical professional and put an end to this foolishness.

At their bi-weekly lunch—a local Indian place near St. Bart’s—the dishes came and went as they chatted about her new appointment, her recent vacation in Spain, and the general ephemera of her life. Not for the first time did John wonder what went wrong. An intelligent, pretty woman with a good sense of humor, he’d had a real passion for her for about six weeks. And then? Well, the spark between them seemed to just snuff out. And while the sex was still decent it was only that, decent; a friends-with-benefits sensibility about it. John was bored in a comfortably pleasant way. And they’d only been dating ten weeks.

After a go that felt more mandatory than anything else, he lay there sated but not, and finally acknowledged the now nearly constant niggle of guilt that demanded that they talk about this. Before he could say anything, she turned toward him and he positioned his mouth in the expectation of a good night kiss. She by-passed his mouth entirely to kiss his forehead, and then gave his ear an affection tweak. “John, you know, it’s all right. We can be friends.”

That was that. They became friends. 

The occasional dinner and movie was out, as John resented paying all those pounds for dinners he never finished and movies he never saw the end of. Even ignoring his mobile was pointless because Sherlock had implanted some sort of tracking device on it and had no compunction about marching into restaurants or theatres and shouting at the top of his lungs, “John, where are you?” Fortunately, even Sherlock seemed to accept that clinic days were inviolate. Not that the hours leading up to his shifts were, nor were the hours immediately after, however the actual eight to four were his own. He had lunch with Harry every other Wednesday and Sarah on the Wednesday he wasn’t lunching with Harry. 

“How’s your better half?” She always referred to Sherlock with that appellation and every time John found himself tamping down his irritation. Before he could deny it—also standard—she added, “As annoying and brilliant as ever?”

This was precisely the opening John needed. 

“He’s not my better half. You will never believe the nonsense he came up with last week. Very unlike him, I must admit. We’re at this crime scene. Gore like you wouldn’t believe. A grotty bedsit in Peckham that was wall to wall bodies, all of their throats cut. We had to wade through literally gallons of blood.”

Being a doctor, none of these details particularly fazed Sarah, which was yet another reason why he just didn’t understand why it didn’t work out between them. Aside from Sherlock, John really couldn’t discuss this aspect of his life with anyone else. Sarah’s medical background gave her a professional curiosity regarding crime scenes, much as Sherlock’s mental curiosity bleached all of the violence into nothing more than clues. Of course, medical expertise wasn’t a basis for a relationship. He couldn’t stand the chief of Bart’s ER, who was even more beautiful and brilliant compared to Sarah, but also put the “cee” in condescending, always saying his name in this questioning tone—“Doctor? Watson, may I have a word?”—as if he’d received his degree in one of those Caribbean nations where it was debatable whether his degree was in medicine or beach volleyball. 

“Even _I_ was a bit green at the gills,” he admitted. “The only time I’ve seen anything worse was the aftermath of a suicide bomber in a market square in Fallujah.” Sarah reached for his hand and held it tight. “To top it off, all of them had been castrated and in some ritualistic threat or, I don’t know, a warning, an act of revenge, maybe—that’s Sherlock’s take on it, I have no idea—their dicks were stuffed in their mouths.”

“Oh Christ, how awful,” she commiserated and squeezed his hand.

“Yes, it was pretty grim. Half of Lestrade’s men were upchucking out of windows and the other half had their hands cupped over their groins.”

“And Sherlock wasn’t bothered one iota.”

They shared a conspiratorial grin. 

“Of course not. In fact he had this fantastic supposition that the genitalia had been switched around, as in Dead Body A had Dead Body E’s dick in his mouth. This is the hilarious part.” It was so ludicrous that John couldn’t help but snort out a little laugh or two before continuing. “He insisted that he could identify which dick belonged to which corpse by—”

“Their baby toes,” she said matter-of-factly. “Fairly infallible, really. John? What’s wrong?”

******************************

He’d gone mad. Absolutely mad. 

John’s kinks had always been fairly middle-of-the-road. Nothing terribly exotic. Minor bondage games, the occasional spanking (although he really had to be in a certain mood to give _and/or_ receive), and blindfolds every now and then were fun. The only thing that consistently rang his bell were sounds. Sucking sounds, sighs, moaning was an aural delight, grunts were guaranteed erections, and filthy language in the throes of sexual ecstasy often precipitated orgasm. A foot fetish? No, not even close. 

And yet for the rest of the afternoon he found himself staring at people’s shoes. Wondering about their toes or “toe” if you wanted to be precise about it. He hadn’t had the nerve to ask Sarah if it were similar for women—toe equivalents to cup size—because he still wasn’t quite sure that this wasn’t some sort of gigantic leg pull. Regardless, it obliterated to hell what heretofore had been an unshakable conviction that he was one hundred percent hetero, because he found that he really didn’t care about women and their stupid toes. It was the men that were driving him mad. Damn them and their shoes and their baby toes.

Normally he’d finished up his clinic days with a brisk walk home. Sherlock never walked when he could race somewhere, and John found that if he wanted to keep up, he had to severely increase his quota of exercise or he’d run himself right into a heart attack. Three and a half miles four times a week at a punishing clip had resulted in a marked improvement in his stamina, blood pressure, and his glucose index. Today however, he didn’t think he could physically walk those three and a half miles without staring at all these shoes he’d encounter, which were hiding all those potential toes!

Forcing himself to be civil to Mrs. Hudson’s gentle enquiry about his day, he raced up the stairs to their flat and fell against the door, fumbling with the lock as if being pursued by knife-wheedling assassins. He just wanted inside in a silly attempt to escape from his own newly minted, apparently, bizarre fascination with men’s baby toes. And the rest of the corollary.

Despite all the noise he’d made getting into the flat, Sherlock was asleep on the couch. Sherlock didn’t have any sleeping pattern what so ever. He stayed awake until he absolutely couldn’t anymore and then passed out from exhaustion. A herd of elephants could have stampeded through their living room and Sherlock would have slept through it. John couldn’t remember an instance where Sherlock had actually slept in his bed. It was more a catch-all for his meager wardrobe. This was typical: his laptop open but having graduated to sleep mode, his head lolling against his shoulder, he was snoring slightly, and his feet were propped up against their battered coffee table.

But not just his feet.

His _bare_ feet. Which were, most definitely, connected to his toes. Specifically his baby toe. 

Not even knowing why, John ran up to his room and locked his door before crawling into bed, pulling the covers over his head, and shoving down his pants and boxers. Too impatient to even hunt for the lube under his pillow, he spit into his hand and brought himself off in less than thirty seconds.

What in the bloody hell was the matter with him?

*************************************

Even the weather began to conspire against him.

No one in their right mind could wear shoes in this heat if they could help it, and after two years of never seeing Sherlock’s feet, John all of a sudden couldn’t get away from them. They were propped up on the coffee table, the edge of the sofa, he even dangled them out a window one warm afternoon. In fact, if John didn’t know any better, he’d say that Sherlock was purposefully putting his feet on display at every frigging opportunity.

After the wettest, coldest winter in seventy-five years, they were suddenly blessed with a heat wave. Heat always made John as randy as a dog, well, in heat. His tours in Afghanistan were an exercise in sexual frustration. Being on the second floor, their flat was so roasting that the glue on the back of the wall paper began melting and the paper itself began to buckle. 

“I swear, Mrs Hudson, he didn’t do anything. This time,” John amended.

“Oh, dear,” she sighed, as she fanned herself with a gigantic palmetto. “There’s no point of in doing anything until this heat wave breaks. Sad. I liked that wall paper.”

Secretly John was overjoyed at the wallpaper having to be replaced because he suspected that its pattern—absolutely migraine-inducing—was the reason why he became prone to headaches every since he’d moved in here. It was too hot to finish what nature had started and start stripping it off the wall, plus where was he going to put it? Sherlock had filled all the bins with what looked like buckets and buckets of human hair. As Sherlock’s mop of unruly, unkempt curls remained—even curlier in the heat—it must be yet another one of those bloody experiments. John had learned not to ask.

Even as the two of them stood there, a strip fell off and covered Sherlock, who was sitting on the couch.

With six wee little fans pointed at his laptop so stop it from overheating, Sherlock had looked up when she entered the room and gave one of his fake smiles and then went back to his computer screen. Based on how happy Sherlock looked, he was researching something exceptionally gruesome. 

When she’d left Sherlock asked, “Could someone run with a compound fracture?”

“Yes,” John replied, his war time experience having given him a crash course on the extraordinary. “It would have to be exceptional circumstances, but yes.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Hideous pattern. Enough to make me start smoking again.”

“You’ve lived here for ten years. Don’t use that excuse, and no you may _not_ have one out of the secret stash.”

“My point exactly. It drove me to smoke in the first place. Well, that’s not exactly true. It excited my optical nerve, which induced headaches, which I combated with the vasoconstrictor I had on hand: a package of cigarettes.” Sherlock still hadn’t crawled out from under the strip of wallpaper draped over him. 

“Just had a packet on hand, eh?” Now that Mrs. Hudson was gone he stripped down to his boxers and no shirt. Flopping down into the lone chair, he debated stealing one of those fans. This heat was unbearable. ‘You know, you could have put on some clothes. Not that I’m sure Mrs. Hudson hasn’t seen it before.”

“I’m wearing clothes. One?”

“No, so just give up. Boxers do not qualify as clothes.”

“They most certainly do.”

“Yes, technically, they do, but…” 

Sherlock put his feet up on the coffee table. His bare feet.

“C-C-Could you not do that?”

“Do what,” Sherlock said absentmindedly from under the wallpaper and then crossed his feet. “Did you know that Lestrade is up for a promotion?”

“Are you hacking into the department files again? Yes. He’s mentioned it about a million times. Your feet. On the coffee table. Off.”

Which was the most ludicrous request ever because Sherlock’s feet were probably the most innocuous things that had graced that table in years. Two weeks ago there’d been six dead raccoons draped across it.

Sherlock ignored him. 

“Sherlock! Remove your bloody feet!” John shouted.

Sherlock batted away the strip of wallpaper and stared down the length of his legs to where his feet were crossed at the ankles. Then he looked at John flaked out in the chair. Then he looked at John’s feet. Then he looked at John’s baby toes, first one then the other.

“Interesting.”

Sherlock wiggled his toes.

John immediately clamped two hands over his growing erection, but he couldn’t stop the sexual flush that raced up his torso and basically threatened to blow his head off.

“Very interesting.”

Fixing on another strip of wallpaper threatening to come off the wall, John mumbled, “Look, this is just a weird thing lately and it’s the heat, and I’m going to go upstairs now... He struggled to hoist himself out of the chair, which wasn’t easy as he was trying to corral his erection with one hand and attempting to use the other to hoist himself out of the chair, which turned out to be harder than it should have been because he was stuck to the leather because it was so bloody hot. In the end it didn’t matter because a hand pushed him back into the chair. Sherlock hiked up his leg and a foot appeared on the arm of the chair.

Oh his toes. They weren’t plump like John’s but long and elegant with tiniest little tufts of black hair sprinkled across the top of the knuckle. His baby toe was hairless though, and long and slender with a cute little tip. John leaned over and licked it; his dick leaped about two feet, desperate to get out from the confines of his pants. 

John looked up. Sherlock had his “calculating” face on. That magnificent brain was cataloguing and sorting and eliminating the data that didn’t fit, adding it all up and applying about a bazillion mathematical algorithms. The easing of the vee between his eyebrows told John that Sherlock had reached an answer. John could have saved him the trouble because it was crystal clear: John Watson was one perverted motherfucker and despite all protests to the contrary, was, obviously, bisexual. 

“What if I did…” Sherlock removed his foot from the arm of the chair and pressed it against John’s hands, which had initially been covering his erection and now were desperate to rub against his dick. 

“Fuck, fuck,” moaned John.

“Remove your hands.”

Sherlock pulled back his foot for just a second so John could remove his hands and then the foot returned. When the foot returned, it was with more pressure and a kind of kneading action that sent John absolutely spare. Fuck dignity. Fuck heterosexuality. He began to ride against the sole of Sherlock’s foot, bucking in the chair so violently the springs began to squeak in protest. His orgasm was brutal in the best possible way. 

When he could breathe properly, he opened his eyes, not knowing what he expected although hoping against hope that Sherlock wasn’t too disgusted with him or, even worse, bored. Sherlock was staring at his nipples, his eyes darting back and forth from one to the other, his tongue swiping back and forth on his lower lip. 

“Did you know that your nipples turn bright red when you orgasm?” Sherlock almost panted this out, his own erection straining against _his_ boxers now.

“Come here.” It was John’s turn to give orders.

Sherlock hesitated for a moment and then inched forward. John spit into his hand and covered each nipple with a generous amount of saliva. Yanking down on Sherlock boxers, he then grabbed Sherlock’s dick, which was _not_ long, _not_ skinny, and _didn’t_ have a cute tip. Sherlock had a big fat monster of a dick with a bulbous head. Filing that away for future reference because there was going to be some extremely obnoxious gloating later on, John began to rub it against one nipple and then the other. Sherlock started that timeless rhythmic back and forth, sliding through the slick circle of John’s hand, rubbing across the pointed end of John’s nipple. When he came Sherlock sort of fell over on John, smothering him in hot sweaty limbs.

Once Sherlock’s breath had evened out, John said into Sherlock’s armpit, “You’re crushing me. Let’s go up to my room and lie on the bed. There’s a cross breeze in my room.”

Although Sherlock’s room was closer, to his knowledge Sherlock had _never_ changed the sheets in the entire two years John had been living there; even contemplating the state of those sheets made him want to bathe in pure bleach. 

John sniffed the air. “A storm is coming on, thank God. We can listen to the rain.”

Sherlock gave him a look.

“Right. I’ll listen to the rain, you can lie there calculating who had the most sperm versus our respective ages versus what we’ve eaten today versus the heat versus what Mycroft had for breakfast this morning. I imagine that he will figure in there somewhere.”

John got up half expecting Sherlock to stay put, but no, there was the light pad of feet behind him. Once they lay down, with Sherlock taking up the lion’s share of the bed, John figured he’d better say something.

“Look, that was absolutely bloody fine and I wouldn’t mind a few more go arounds. Or lots of go arounds. I don’t know. But if you’re ho hum about it all, then we’ll just leave it at that.”

Although Sherlock’s genius often made him the most irritating git in Britain, it also made him much easier to talk to vis a vis subjects that most people would find awkward. You couldn’t embarrass him, so you tended not to be embarrassed yourself. It was what it was. 

Sherlock brought his big toe against John’s big toe. Whether it was a deliberate gesture, John wasn’t sure. 

“The heat would make a huge difference in terms of sperm count, and the gap between ejaculations would affect the amount. John, when was the last time you—”

“Absolutely not, we are not going there. And by the way, so much for your ridiculous theory. I knew it was a bunch of bollocks, and how you roped both Molly and Lestrade—”

Sherlock had a lovely laugh. He didn’t laugh that often and John realized how sad it was, that Sherlock found so little funny. 

“Are you quite done?” John demanded, when Sherlock’s guffaws had trickled down to a couple of amused snorts.

“Actually, it’s not a joke, although I must confess that Lestrade had me in peals of laughter at your phone call with that ridiculous story to finagle your way into the morgue. Obviously, there are outliers,” Sherlock said with a pointed look down at his groin, “but statistically 85% are fairly decent odds if you’re thinking of those men.”

“Yes, the perfect visual while enjoying post-coital bliss. Severed penises.”

Ignoring the biting sarcasm in John’s voice, Sherlock added, “Even if one of the men were a statistical anomaly, the sampling would have been such that we would have had little problem matching up parts with toes. Mycroft and I are definitely outliers. His—”

“I really do not want to hear about Mycroft’s dick, thank you very much. So are we on with this or not?” Again, how lovely to just lay it out there. Sherlock looked puzzled. “Are you _interested_ or not. Future whatnots.”

Sherlock thought for a moment. “Will it stay interesting?”

John laughed. “I don’t know. Possibly. Possibly not. Let’s just play it by ear, shall we?”

This time Sherlock’s big toe definitely pressed John’s big toe.

“Speaking of which, did you know that ear lobes are markers for the size of one’s balls?”

“Absolute bollocks,” John insisted. But then John couldn’t help but look. Sherlock had tiny, delicate earlobes and his balls, certainly in relationship to his dick, were relatively tiny and delicate.

Sherlock wiggled his ears.

_Fin_


End file.
